What The Deck

What the Deck is a brainstorming card deck for video game development. It’s a tool to help game designers, hobbyists, fans and wannabes, generate original ideas for new games. It’s an idea randomizer and an introduction to, designing within constraints, in a super fun, fast freeway past the blank sheet of paper. The deck is 259 cards that come in 5 decks: Genre, Mechanics/Hazards, World/Environment, Story/Setting and Characters/Enemies.

Draw a couple cards from the Genre deck (black cards) and inspect both sides. Then draw a couple from the Mechanics deck (red cards). Any ideas sparking? Great! Place those cards in front of you. If any card just isn’t speaking to you, discard it and draw a replacement. Wash, rinse and repeat. Now, draw a card or two from both the Story deck (green) and World deck (blue). Place any cards you like in front of you, or replace any duds. Break out a notebook, dry erase marker/board, post-its… whatever. Try to describe a video game that uses any combination of the cards in front of you. Be instinctive, try not to overthink it and just react to the constraints you’ve presented.

Now, after a few minutes, you should have some ideas to bump into each other. Jot those down and try to expand and connect them. Eventually, the design turns toward the characters and enemies in your game. Flip any (or all) of the cards in front of you over, to reveal images you can use to inform their design. This aspect is purely visual and not meant to be used literally. If the image is of a toy car, enemies don’t have to be all toy cars. Try to react to some aspect of the toy car. Perhaps it’s color, proportions, does it roll or otherwise articulate, get inspired by a tiny detail…

That’s it! It should be fun and fast. Your design will be messy, embrace it. Don’t sweat details and don’t edit. The objective is to generate ideas, lots of them. Classifying them as “good ideas”, “bad ideas”, “dumb ideas’ or “impossible” is a waste of time at this point. Good ideas can come from surprising places and sometimes when you start banging ideas into each other, they generate a real spark.